The election, news and reality

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Published: Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 02:57 PM.

Pundits on either end of the political spectrum likewise took each item of news as a stunning vindication of what they had said all along. No cable-news guest was heard to say, “You know, this convinces me I’ve been completely wrong.”

What makes the breathless anticipation of this report particularly odd is that whatever number BLS announces for the gain or loss of jobs, it probably won’t be accurate. These releases are preliminary calculations that are frequently revised in the following weeks.

Toward the end of the October release was this statement: “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised from +141,000 to +181,000, and the change for August was revised from +96,000 to +142,000.” The August number was off by more than 50 percent.

So when we get the employment numbers this morning, they may or may not correspond to reality. That’s sort of fitting, since many of the reactions won’t either.

The biggest day of this presidential campaign is Tuesday: Election Day. The second-biggest comes a bit earlier: Today.

It will bring the moment awaited by everyone in both campaigns as well as the commentariat. At 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its monthly employment report, the final chance to assess the state of the economy before voters — at least the thousands in North Carolina who haven’t voted early yet — head to the polls.

You can be sure that all concerned have comments ready for any of three eventualities: the unemployment rate is down from last month, the unemployment rate is up, or the unemployment rate is the same.

Republicans are no doubt hoping for an uptick to push undecided voters into Mitt Romney’s column. Likewise, Democrats yearn for a drop that may persuade those same citizens to stick with Barack Obama. But if the number breaks the way one side wants, don’t expect the other side to concede a thing.

Even if the rate falls, Romney’s spokesperson will be able to explain why things are not getting better. Even if the rate jumps, the White House will find proof that its policies are good medicine. The strange feature of this vitally important and so far unknown piece of information is that it will not change the minds of the vast majority of those who are paying attention to it.

That was how things went with the previous release, when BLS reported that the unemployment rate fell from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September. “Today, I believe that as a nation, we are moving forward again,” announced Obama. Romney differed: “This is not what a real recovery looks like. We created fewer jobs in September than in August, and fewer jobs in August than in July.”

When the unemployment rate inched up in June, Romney called it a “hammer blow to struggling middle-class families.” Obama’s chief economic adviser, however, said the economy “is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

Pundits on either end of the political spectrum likewise took each item of news as a stunning vindication of what they had said all along. No cable-news guest was heard to say, “You know, this convinces me I’ve been completely wrong.”

What makes the breathless anticipation of this report particularly odd is that whatever number BLS announces for the gain or loss of jobs, it probably won’t be accurate. These releases are preliminary calculations that are frequently revised in the following weeks.

Toward the end of the October release was this statement: “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised from +141,000 to +181,000, and the change for August was revised from +96,000 to +142,000.” The August number was off by more than 50 percent.

So when we get the employment numbers this morning, they may or may not correspond to reality. That’s sort of fitting, since many of the reactions won’t either.